Notes on People; New York Writer Getting PEN/Faulkner Award

By Albin Krebs and Robert Thomas

Published: April 18, 1981

The first annual PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction will be presented today to Walter Abish, a Vienna-born writer who now lives in New York and lectures at Columbia University.

His novel ''How German Is It'' was chosen as the best American novel of 1980 over four other nominees, including ''A Confederacy of Dunces,'' by the late John Kennedy Toole, which this week won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction.

Mr. Abish's novel, published by New Directions, never made a bestseller list but, said the judges' citation, it ''helps keep the American novel alive in its time.''

''The prose of this novel,'' it adds, ''is as cold as snow in a storm, and as driven.'' It deals with a young German's effort to reconcile the modern, democratic Germany with its heritage.

The 50-year-old novelist, who became an American citizen in 1960, spent much of his childhood in Shanghai and has served in the Israeli Army. He was recently awarded a Guggenheim fellowship.

The $2,000 award, named for William Faulkner, will be presented to Mr. Abish today in the rotunda of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. It is sponsored by the American Center of PEN, an international organization of poets, playwrights, essayists, editors and novelists, and PEN South.

The PEN/Faulkner award was established last year shortly after PEN voted a boycott of the American Book Awards, on the ground that they were ''too commercial.''